[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by twobob

so

is just trimming the first char for a test? perhaps I can bodge that another way

EDIT:

if [[ \" = $( `echo $x | awk '{print substr ($0, 0, 1)}'` ) ]]; then

maybe??

You can probably try with head as well:

if [[ \" = $( `echo $x | head -c 1` ) ]]; then

Might be faster than calling awk? Combined with tail, you could get any substring out. Like:

echo $x | head -c 3 | tail -c 2

And my bad, it is indeed what you thought initially - the substring handling is the part that it does not like. Busybox must have extended the shell to be somewhat more bash like in later versions.